Amph One Thread To Rule Them All: The Rings of Power + The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings Trilogies

That's a gorgeous TV spot. Gives the setup to those new to the story, and shows Martin off brilliantly. The line about helping the dwarves if he can - delivered sincerely - followed immediately by a great comic reaction to Thorin's question.

 

Replace "depravity" with "brilliance".

 

Yes. Sam and Frodo are the greatest homosexual couple in modern literature, by a landslide.

 

I love The Silmarillion dearly, but I find that its parts are greater than the sum of its parts. I can only read it in small servings.

 

My first introduction to Tolkien was apparently through a puppet show based on The Hobbit when I was a child (though I remember little of it, if anything), which my parents say was a bit scary for such a young one. My mother also read the book aloud to me before going to bed around that time. As a teenager, a friend of mine told me to try and read the LOTR trilogy, and, undaunted by the thickness of the tomes (I had already read the complete works of Jane Austen, after all), I plunged in and fell in love with Middle-Earth. I was especially interested in the connections I could make with European myths like that of Arthur (Aragorn as the Once and Future King, with Anduril as his Excalibur, amongst other comparisons). I then "graduated", so to speak, to the Silmarillion, but I read it in fits and starts, finding that the mythology was so rich that I needed time to let it settle in my head. Still, I'm glad I had the patience to go through it, as it's quite possibly in my Top Ten of favourite books.

Regretfully, I do not have time to re-read the books regularly, except for going back to a favourite passage here and there (I have many projects and fields of interest on top of my career, and there are only 24 hours in a day!). Yet I count that as a blessing in disguise, as when the LOTR films arrived in the theatre, I had conveniently forgotten enough of the plot to be surprised by some twists, and not be unduly shocked by additions or cuts to the scenario. So I'm taking the same approach to The Hobbit. I remember the broad lines, but I want to have a fresh perspective on this new trilogy and not do a side-by-side comparison in my head, so I'll probably delay a re-read of the book after the last film is out.

Cheers,
Lauré

 

I agree with you 1000%. I read LOTR sometime after the release of Fellowship to see, well, what happened next (yeah, I suffer from the pathological need to spoil myself no matter what). Long story short, it was a tough read.

It's not like the books were written in Quenya or Sindarin (and I wager that if he could've gotten away with it, Tolkien would've written them that way). But the pacing is atrocious. Sometimes Tolkien cared a little too much about the nooks and crannies of every tree in Fangorn or every crag of the Emyn Muil, or the lines of kings of Rohan. And then the singing. All that goddam singing. I skipped most of the lines because I hate musicals with a passion, and I'm not gonna try to sing along in my head to something to which I don't know the tune and who knows if the author even knows the tune to the hundreds of songs he wrote in the tongues of Men or Elves. The point is, all those distractions brought the pacing to a screeching halt and it felt like ages before I was done with one single page.

So yeah, if I had a LOTR itch that need scratching and were given the choice of reading the book or just popping one the DVDs in any ol' player, guess which one would win.

And yeah, Tom Bombadil. Good call leaving him out altogether PJ.

 

I agree that the songs can sometimes break the rythm, but as a Classical Music buff and a fan of Howard Shore's soundtrack, I must admit it's been rather fun to let myself be inspired by the overall mood he set and come up with a few simple melodies to put on a couple of songs (The Song of Nimrodel and the Lament of the Rohirrim). Though it's true the songs could have been put in an appendix, I think they would have lost a bit of their flavour out of their context, and maybe not have been such a source of inspiration... To each their own, I guess.

Cheers,
Lauré

 

solojones , LotR gets waaay better after the first half of FotR when Tolkien figured out what the **** he was writing.

 

Songs? Songs, you say?

There used to be a fan musical group in the Czech Republic called "The Poetic Fellowship" some years back, and they put a lot of Tolkien's songs to music, as well as writing their own Tolkien-inspired music. Here are a few of my favourite songs by them (please excuse the somewhat amateurish quality of recording):

Beren and Lúthien
Snow-white
Snow-white (shorter, better quality)
Bilbo to Boromir
Nimrodel
Song of Galadriel
Ai! Laurië Lantar

 

And just because:


Cheers,
Lauré

 

TV Spot #7!

McKellen's delivery of the line "You'll have a tale or two to tell when you come back" gets me every time. The best bit, though?

Spoiler

Ori and Dwalin dialogue.

EDIT:

 

While letting Treebeard play his role and use some of his dialogue in a TTT EE scene modeled on the Old Forest.

Me too! I wonder if it was the same puppet show. The Gollum puppet looked suspiciously like Kermit...

 

Spoiler

Poor Dwarves. The elvish food might be a bit too vegetarian for their tastes...

 

The scene is going to be hilarious.

I also love how the TV spot paired the word "stealth" with Bombur's 'incident'.

 

The Children of Hurin is still the best Tolkien book.

 

Please, post more Christopher Lee. The man is my favorite actor, and the one whom I have the highest amount of respect for. Simply an amazing man in many ways.

Nice! Let me share with you one of my favorite versions of the Beren and Luthien piece.

 

"Where's the MEAT!"

 

His flawless pronunciation of the Elvish names =

 

Well he did meet the Big Man once or so, so it's might not be surprising he knows how to pronounce everything correctly.

 

Oh, I know. Also, he apparently re-reads LOTR every year for the past I don't know how many decades. One of the LOTR DVD extras had him explaining the importance of pronouncing the names correctly. For instance, Gandalf is "Gun-dalf", not "G-and-olf". Etcetera. If I'm not mistaken, he was the only actor in LOTR whose pronunciation of Elvish names and words was absolutely spotless. Even Galadriel messed up the pronunciation of "Eärendil".

So yeah, I can really appreciate someone pronouncing these names flawlessly.

 

And oddly enough, it's after FOTR that the movies take a massive nose-dive.

 

No doubt about it. What a great story.

 

http://www.firstshowing.net/2012/another-gigantic-sculpture-for-the-hobbit-installed-in-new-zealand/

 

I like the countdown.

 

Stuff.co.nz confirms a very spoiler dwarf

Spoiler

Oh please, please let it be Dís...